Two Documents: 1992: Robert Bloch remonstrates with Joe Lansdale and David Webb for mocking Karen Finley; FANTASTIC absorbs FANTASTIC ADVENTURES in 1953

Your horror/suspense and fantasy+ magazine artifacts for Labor Day.

Richard Chizmar shared some Cemetery Dance correspondence on FaceBook some years back. (Few spell "cemetery" correctly with consistency...I certainly have learned to look again when I type the word.)(Didn't hurt Chizmar's collaborator Stephen King any, though he might've had a point to make...)

And the house ad announcing that the semi-slick digest Fantastic would be absorbing its pulp predecessor Fantastic Adventures, marking the end of the run for an often engaging (and occasionally impressive, particularly around 1950) pulp title and no more attempt to make a sustained "prestige" magazine of Fantastic, which would go into a not-trying-too-hard slump till Cele Goldsmith, later Cele Lalli, and by the end of her career as a major editor of bridal magazines Cele Goldsmith Lalli, was given her first full-editor opportunity with Fantastic and Amazing Stories in 1959-65.

A rather typical, if star-studded, example of early FA (1941):

One of my favorite issues, 1950; the brilliant Leiber novella (apparently written for and purchased by Unknown Worlds, but in inventory when that magazine folded)  is joined by pleasant stories by Robert Bloch, William McGivern and (though slight, I remember it as not bad) June Lurie: 

Howard Browne was editing FA by 1950, having succeeded founding editor Ray Palmer; Browne was allowed to attempt a more sophisticated package with Fantastic, with one of Browne's best issues here: 

The last FA:

Fantastic's first post merger issue...though it wouldn't start running on fumes for another year, with the August 1954 issue the first predominantly devoted to yard-goods fiction...

FFStories: Mickey Spillane Parodies and Pastiches by Jean Kerr, Fritz Leiber and Howard Browne

Three stories this week that are meant to be parodic pastiches of Mickey Spillane, at least in part. I'd first read all these before I'd actually read Spillane, but the degree of his influence on the literary culture and beyond was already felt sufficiently that I could see where they were coming from. (I might be one of the relative few modern readers who read Spillane's great model, upon whom he improved, Carroll John Daly, before reading Spillane as well. Three writers, all playwrights at various points in their careers, and all prone toward the satirical when the mood struck). (The hotlinks below take you to the texts of the Kerr and Browne stories, and to a reading of the Leiber, the most widely-reprinted of the three.)

Jean Kerr's "Don Brown's Body" was the first I'd read, in her Please Don't Eat the Daisies, a collection of essays and fictions, which might (unfairly) mostly bring to mind the Doris Day film (and subsequent tv series) based on the coping-with-children title entry, very much in the Shirley Jackson/Erma Bombeck "safe" mode of such writing, though perhaps a bit less anodyne than they could be. Spillane is one of two primary targets here, the other the pomposity of staged readings, particularly when devoted to such at times heavy going as the epic poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet...a genius, but definitely one better remembered for his shorter works.  (Kerr was a playwright as well as prose writer, and Kerr's husband was a prominent stage drama critic, Walter Kerr, and presumably not a little time not spent with the children was devoted to accompanying her husband to some lesser as well as greater performances, when she wasn't attending or attending to productions on her own). "Don Brown's Body" was my favorite piece in the book, deft and certainly with a Harvey Kurtzmanesque insouciance taking down her mash-up subjects. Sally's beverage of choice, and the reason it was, was perhaps my favorite single joke in the piece.

Fritz Leiber's "The Night He Cried" uses Slickey Millane as a character (who both writes about a Hammer character and is himself "the dispenser of sex and justice" in these parts), rather than Mike Hammer himself, albeit Millane is clearly more a stand-in for the Hammer Geist than for Spillane as person or even perhaps as prime mover of the genre. Another Maddish parody, in this one an alien observer is sent down to try to encourage the arrested-development case Millane to realize that he might relate to a woman as something other than punching bag, sex target and bullet repository, when not simply barking at them...Leiber having a rather complex set of reactions to the Spillane school of hardboiled writing. Leiber was a rather pro-feminist man, as such work as Conjure Wife and, perhaps less blatantly, The Big Time makes very clear, but also felt at least somewhat henpecked from early on (see "Gonna Roll the Bones" as well as his autobiographical essay in the late collection The Ghost Light) when raised by highly controlling aunts and such while his parents toured with their Shakespearean company; his relation with his wife was both very close and intermittently interdependent, as explored in such work as "The

Secret Songs" and a story in part a memorial for her, "Ill Met in Lankhmar".  So, even though he could and did write in a Spillane mode less parodically (see "I'm Looking for 'Jeff'"--a story, published in Howard Browne's Fantastic, which upset James Blish by its apparent faithfulness to a Spillane template), his desire to parody the extremity of Spillane's black and white judgment of his women characters was strong, and elegantly expressed in this novelet, originally in the first volume of Frederik Pohl's anthology series Star Science Fiction. The imagery of the alien creature, slightly inebriated and with all loving intent losing the ability to control its woman-like appearance, has stuck with me, as it understandably upsets the already somewhat unmanned Millane in the story.  I first read it in The Best of Fritz Leiber, where Leiber has a brief comment on it as he does on all the contents. 

And Howard Browne's "The Veiled Woman" is the least (on its face) parodic, and perhaps even the least fond (though the misogyny Leiber chides and Kerr gleefully mobs in their stories is slightly more played along with, in some ways and less in others, in this novella than in the others). Browne famously ghosted this story, much to Spillane's initial displeasure, after Spillane's "The Green Girl," the contracted-for story for the third issue of Browne's new magazine Fantastic, was described in some detail by Spillane in the course of a photo-profile in Life magazine, released at about the same time as the Fantastic issue was going to press. Faced with the "scoop" of the actual Spillane story by one of the largest-circulation magazines in business, and, as Browne would later admit, because he absolutely hated "The Green Girl" as a story, Browne hurriedly wrote a Spillane pastiche that also gathered up a favored trope of Browne's predecessor editor at Ziff-Davis's fiction magazines, Ray Palmer, who always was ready for another Lost Civilization, Hidden from Human Ken, story. "The Veiled Woman" also allowed Browne, a not untalented crime fiction writer in his own right (and capable of competent if uninspired copy in sf, and sometimes more-engaged fantasy), to take a whack at McCarthyism and the Cold War, from the same sort of Benevolent Visitor perspective as Leiber had employed...only, to keep it true to the Mike Hammer-and-company canon, things turn out much less well for everyone involved. (The not-quite nihilist vigilantism of Spillane's stories would certainly be amped up the next year in another magazine that got of to a popular start in part due Spillane's by-line on new fiction within, Manhunt.)  One imagines that Browne was enjoying mocking Spillane's work to some extent, and perhaps more acutely than some feeling envious of Spillane's market for the work he wanted to do...while Browne increasingly sought to find time to write, eventually letting his editorial duties go by the wayside to do so as Ziff-Davis cut the resources they made available to their fiction magazines. However sliced, this third issue of Fantastic is still legendarily the best-selling single issue of any fantasy or sf magazine published so far (I've been looking for an image with the banner-wrap that announced the "Spillane" story...the  usual citation is that the third issue of Fantastic sold about 300,000 copies, between the demand for Spillane fiction and the boost, ironically, the Life profile might have given to reader curiosity...).

For more of today's obscure work, mostly books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Howard Browne magazines at Ziff-Davis, an addition

After they finally let Howard Browne have his semi-slick Fantastic in 1952, to initial excellent sales...

they also finally remade Amazing in the same image the next year...

and even let Browne revive the crime-fiction magazine line:

and the adventure line, which had been short-lived in the pulp days--and no attempt to gin up a "3-Mile Limit Confidential!"...

...but the latter two saw only one issue each, and Fantastic and Amazing were soon to face reduced budgets, even as Fantastic Adventures, since 1939 Amazing's more fantasy-prone companion, was quietly merged with Fantastic 

UK edition with otherwise identical cover; cover story reprinted as 
Black Magic Holiday

in 1953...leading, I gather, not only to Browne's disenchantment, but eventually to the schism between B.G. Davis and William Ziff's successors at ZD...though in 1954, Ziff-Davis published two reprint issues of the London Mystery Magazine as ZD publications, and oddly crediting Browne as editor, though he had essentially nothing to do with editorial choices there...ZD presumably also aided in the limited US distribution of the magazine for some period in the 1950s...

...and Davis eventually leaving to found Davis Publications, buying Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from Mercury Press, and briefly offering (two issues only) Jack London's Adventure Magazine in 1958:

One thing I hadn't caught up with till now: Ziff-Davis's comic book line:

GI Joe loves his work...in a way Bill Mauldin's Joe would find odd...

and...here's Wikipedia's Fantastic logotypes through the decades:

And...while it was published after Howard Browne left ZD, there was a spin-off title from wish-fulfillment fantasy issues of Fantastic that managed to run for three issues under successor Paul Fairman, in 1957:

(originally published Xmas Eve, 2015)

correction and update: FFB/S/M: Shirley Jackson's stories first published in fantasy-fiction magazines

Shirley Jackson, author of one of the most unpopular stories ever published in The New Yorker ("The Lottery", of course, which has utterly outlived most of its outraged critics and subscription cancellers, and, perhaps sadly, sustained a readership that most of Jackson's work has not), and one of the pivotal figures in the creation of the new horror fiction, and the allied suspense fiction (such as that clangorous short), that was emerging in the 1940s, with Jackson along with John Collier one of its progenitors who only infrequently contributed to the fantasy-fiction magazines (unlike Robert Bloch or Fritz Leiber or Margaret St. Clair, whose careers orbited initially around those titles, or Cornell Woolrich or Algernon Blackwood, who were fairly frequent contributors even if their primary markets were elsewhere). As far as I know at the moment (thanks to Matthew Davis's comment below, I've added one--in fact her first for F&SF), only five of her stories were first published in the fantasy markets, somewhat unsurprisingly in the two most sustained fantasy magazines to fully establish themselves in the 1950s, Fantastic (as founded in 1952 and edited by crime-fiction writer Howard Browne) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (as co-founded in 1949 and co-edited, then solely edited, by crime-fiction among much else writer Anthony Boucher, born William White).

Jackson's "Root of Evil" appeared in the March-April 1953 issue of Fantastic, and publishers Ziff-Davis were feeling cocky enough about their packaging to have a wraparound cover, with Jackson's story advertised only on the back. Richard Powers's unusually non-abstract imagery is fine, and having both B. Traven and John Collier (and, for no compellingly good reason, Billy Rose the Gypsy Rose Lee promoter, who is credited with fiction in other markets at about this time as well) made Ziff-Davis feel they didn't need to properly advise the newsstand browser. Fantastic in those early years was paying very well, indeed, and stunts such as having stories as by Billy Rose and Mickey Spillane in those issues seemed to be paying off, but Ziff-Davis lost their nerve, and Fantastic soon would be hitting a pretty low point by the mid-'50s, though it was still in its way entertaining, as authorities on the scene such as Bill Crider and Mike Ashley can attest (and even under the darkest days of Paul Fairman's editorship, the run of routine stories mostly by Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, Henry Slesar and Milton Lesser [before he started publishing most of his best work as Stephen Marlowe]--routine stories by intention, these talented writers were there to deliver it Tuesday rather than good, though if good, no problem--would be supplemented by the finds that Fairman's assistant [and eventual vastly better successor] Cele Goldsmith would pull from the slushpile, such as Kate Wilhelm's first published story, "The Pint-Sized Genie"). ZD's purchase of all rights in those years meant that Jackson's story was also reprinted in one of Ted White's early issues of the magazine, a rather better reprint than most he was offered from the same storehouse at the turn of the '70s (albeit the others in that 1969 issue were pretty solid, as well).

Courtesy ISFDB: 

Publication: Fantastic, March-April 1953

• fep • They Write... • essay by Shirley Jackson
• fep • They Write... • essay by Billy Rose
• fep • They Write... • essay by B. Traven
• 4 • The Third Guest • novelette by B. Traven
• 4 •  The Third Guest • interior artwork by Tom O'Sullivan
• 37 • The Delicate Dinosaur • shortstory by William Markham Altman
• 37 •  The Delicate Dinosaur • interior artwork by J. Bryan
• 55 •  Cartoon: "Don't look like they're coming." • interior artwork by Mendoza
• 56 • The Cold Green Eye • shortstory by Jack Williamson
• 56 •  The Cold Green Eye • interior artwork by Ernie Barth
• 66 • Something for the Woman • shortstory by Randall Garrett [as by Ivar Jorgensen ]
• 66 •  Something for the Woman • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Emsh ]
• 74 • The Sword of Yung Lo • shortstory by Maurice Walsh
• 74 •  The Sword of Yung Lo • interior artwork by Ashman [as by Bill Ashman ]
• 88 •  Cartoon: "Anything wild?" • interior artwork by Frosty
• 90 • Stop on the Red • shortstory by Franklin Gregory
• 90 •  Stop on the Red • interior artwork by Charles Berger
• 102 • Escape Me Never • novelette by J. T. McIntosh [as by J. T. M'Intosh ]
• 102 •  Escape Me Never • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Emsh ]
• 121 •  Cartoon: "Now That's enough, John. Our guests aren't interested in your old voodoo hobby." • interior artwork by Ray Dillon
• 124 • Root of Evil • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
• 124 •  Root of Evil • interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 130 • A Star Falls on Broadway • shortstory by Harry Walton [as by Harry Fletcher ]
• 130 •  A Star Falls on Broadway • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by L. R. Summers ]
• 132 • Three Wishes • shortstory by Poul Anderson
• 133 •  Three Wishes • interior artwork by Dick Francis
• 136 •  Cartoon: "Go Where?" • interior artwork by Ray Dillon
• 139 • The Devil George and Rosie • (1934) • novelette by John Collier (variant of The Devil, George, and Rosie)
• 139 •  The Devil George and Rosie • interior artwork by David Stone
• 159 • The Tourists • (1949) • shortstory by Billy Rose
• 159 •  The Tourists • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Harry Garo ]

Publication: Fantastic, June 1969

• 4 • Editorial: Don't • essay by Laurence M. Janifer
• 6 • Emphyrio (Part 1 of 2) • serial by Jack Vance
• 7 •  Emphyrio (Part 1 of 2) • interior artwork by Bruce Elliot Jones
• 78 • The Big Boy • shortstory by Bruce McAllister
• 83 • Time Bum • (1953) • shortstory by C. M. Kornbluth
• 90 • The Opal Necklace • (1952) • shortstory by Kris Neville
• 90 •  The Opal Necklace • (1952) • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by L. R. Summers ]
• 104 • The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch • (1952) • shortstory by Eric Frank Russell
• 104 •  The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch • (1952) • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by L. R. Summers ]
• 122 • Root of Evil • (1953) • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
• 122 •  Root of Evil (reprint) • (1953) • interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 128 • What If • (1952) • shortstory by Isaac Asimov (variant of What If . . .)
• 128 •  What If • (1952) • interior artwork by David Stone
• 142 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, June 1969) • [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essay by Fritz Leiber
• 142 •   Review: Black Easter by James Blish • review by Fritz Leiber
• 143 •   Review: A Glass of Stars by Robert F. Young • review by Fritz Leiber
• 144 • Dark Shadows (Media Review) • essay by Jean Marie Stine [as by Hank Stine ]

Much of what I was surprised about in the packaging of F&SF issues with Jackson stories below becomes even more surprising when one considers Jackson's first appearance in the magazine, with (as Matthew Fox reminds us in the comments) "Bulletin," part of a very star-studded issue indeed, with impressive stories by Alfred Bester, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury and others...and Jackson's name deservedly on the cover. Even though I have this issue, I don't believe I've read "Bulletin" yet...something I should remedy.  (This would be Jackson's only story in an issue while J. Francis McComas was still co-editor; cover is at top of post.)

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1954

• 3 • 5,271,009 • novelette by Alfred Bester
• 33 • Mrs. Hinck • shortstory by Miriam Allen deFord
• 39 • Spunk Water • shortstory by Bill Brown
• 46 • Bulletin • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
• 49 • The Last Caper • shortstory by Charles Beaumont
• 58 • Man Friday • novelette by Roger Dee
• 78 • The Firefighter • shortstory by Robert Abernathy
• 81 • Call Me From the Valley • [John the Balladeer] • shortstory by Manly Wade Wellman (variant of Dumb Supper)
• 91 • Recommended Reading (F&SF, March 1954) • [Recommended Reading] • essay by The Editors
• 92 •   Review: Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham • review by The Editors
• 92 •   Review: Expedition to Earth by Arthur C. Clarke • review by The Editors
• 93 •   Review: The Lights in the Sky are Stars by Fredric Brown • review by The Editors
• 95 • Sriberdegibit • (1943) • novelette by Anthony Boucher
• 122 • All Summer in a Day • shortstory by Ray Bradbury

Jackson's second story for the less "slick" and less stunt-driven, more "literary" (in the same sense that sibling magazine Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine strove to be the most elegant and literate of the cf magazines) F&SF was apparently one she had trouble placing with other markets; as Laurence Jackson Hyman or Sarah Hyman Stewart put it in the clumsily titled collection Just an Ordinary Day, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" sold for peanuts (comparatively...Fantastic at its commercial height was paying 5c/word as a standard rate, and probably a little more to Jackson, while F&SF was more likely to pay 2c/word, again with a bit of a bump--pay rates somewhat reminiscent of the little magazines, as well...this at a time when The New Yorker was paying several hundred 1950s dollars for its short fiction, and The Saturday Evening Post paid five to ten times what TNY chose to afford). 

"Peanuts" is a fine story, even though it's not a fantasy so much as a charming story about people causing varying sorts of mischief; Jerome Bixby's vignette "Trace" would take the same sort of framework and make it unadulterated fantasy, but Boucher rather doubted, apparently, that his readers would mind a not-quite-fantasy by Jackson in their pages. This set up a precedent for two further Jackson stories in Boucher's F&SF, "The Missing Girl" and "The Omen". Though it's notable that Jackson's name is again not on the front cover for the January, 1955 issue, with William Sansom (a rather slick writer of sf and fantasy, who would contribute to The Saturday Evening Post or Playboy at least as often as to fantasy magazines), J. T. McIntosh (once a great F&SF favorite), Isaac Asimov and John Dickson Carr getting the lines instead...

At least by her third appearance, Jackson's credited on the cover...and her fourth and last original publication in F&SF was given an almost solo credit, along with Jane Roberts (most famous for "Seth" "nonfiction" but a fairly prolific contributor to the magazine in the 1950s).

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1955

• 3 • Selection • novelette by J. T. McIntosh
• 34 • The Potato Cake • shortstory by Pauline Clarke
• 38 • The Tournament • shortstory by William Sansom
• 45 • The Expert • [Depression or Bust] • shortstory by Mack Reynolds
• 52 •  Untitled • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller (variant of untitled) [as by Emsh ]
• 53 • One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
• 62 • Single Combat • shortstory by Robert Abernathy
• 70 • The Glass of the Future • poem by Anthony Boucher [as by Herman W. Mudgett ]
• 71 • The Royal Historian of Oz (Part 1 of 2) • essay by Martin Gardner
• 82 • The Girl in the Ice • (1953) • shortstory by Emyr Humphreys
• 85 • The Shopdropper • [Dr. Manly J. Departure] • shortstory by Alan Nelson
• 94 • Recommended Reading (F&SF, January 1955) • [Recommended Reading] • essay by The Editor
• 94 •   Review: To Walk the Night by William Sloane • review by The Editor
• 94 •   Review: The Children's Hour by Marjorie Barrows • review by The Editor
• 95 •   Review: Assignment in Tomorrow by Frederik Pohl • review by The Editor
• 95 •   Review: Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination by Philip Van Doren Stern • review by The Editor
• 95 •   Review: Bloodstock and Other Stories by Margaret Irwin • review by The Editor
• 95 •   Review: The Spoor of Spooks and Other Nonsense by Bergen Evans • review by The Editor
• 96 •   Review: Going Into Space by Arthur C. Clarke • review by The Editor
• 96 •   Review: Children of the Lens by E. E. Smith • review by The Editor
• 96 •   Review: Max by Giovannetti • review by The Editor
• 97 • The Singing Bell • [Wendell Urth] • shortstory by Isaac Asimov
• 111 • Lament by a Maker • poem by L. Sprague de Camp
• 112 • Blind Man's Hood • (1937) • shortstory by John Dickson Carr

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1957

• 5 • I Feel It In My Bones • essay by Isaac Asimov
• 19 • The Word of Willow • (1956) • poem by Leah Bodine Drake
• 20 • Stepping Stone • novelette by William Morrison and Frederik Pohl
• 42 • The Missing Girl • shortstory by Shirley Jackson
• 53 • Holdout • shortstory by Robert Sheckley
• 63 • The Science Screen (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1957) • essay by Charles Beaumont
• 66 • The Cabbage Patch • (1952) • shortstory by Theodore R. Cogswell
• 70 • The Peacemongers • shortstory by Poul Anderson
• 78 • With Butter and Mustard • shortstory by Gordon R. Dickson
• 90 • Insert Knob A in Hole B • shortstory by Isaac Asimov
• 92 • Recommended Reading (F&SF, December 1957) • [Recommended Reading] • essay by Anthony Boucher
• 92 •   Review: Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel by Willy Ley • review by Anthony Boucher
• 92 •   Review: In the Name of Science by Martin Gardner • review by Anthony Boucher
• 93 •   Review: The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace • review by Anthony Boucher
• 93 •   Review: The Lunatic Fringe by Gerald W. Johnson • review by Anthony Boucher
• 94 •   Review: Monkey Business: Hoaxes in the Name of Science by Irving Adler • review by Anthony Boucher
• 94 •   Review: Earth is Room Enough by Isaac Asimov • review by Anthony Boucher
• 94 •   Review: S-F, The Year's Greatest: Second Annual Volume by Judith Merril • review by Anthony Boucher
• 95 •   Review: Off on a Comet by Jules Verne • review by Anthony Boucher
• 95 •   Review: The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne • review by Anthony Boucher
• 95 •   Review: The Time Dissolver by Jerry Sohl • review by Anthony Boucher
• 95 •   Review: Vanguard to Venus by Jeffery Lloyd Castle • review by Anthony Boucher
• 96 •   Review: The Wonderful O by James Thurber • review by Anthony Boucher
• 96 •   Review: Knight's Castle by Edward Eager • review by Anthony Boucher
• 96 •   Review: Who's Who in Science Fiction by Jack Lewis and George Hopkins • review by Anthony Boucher
• 97 • Renaissance • shortstory by G. C. Edmondson
• 111 • Spud and Cochise • (1936) • novelette by Oliver La Farge
• 130 • Index to Volume Thirteen - July 1957-December 1957 • [Index F&SF] • essay by uncredited

This less impressive cover also a wraparound...or at least a duplicate.

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1958

• 5 • The Bundu • [Bundu] • novella by Jane Roberts
• 62 • The Science Stage (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1958) • essay by William Morrison
• 64 • Gladiator • shortstory by Mack Reynolds
• 77 • A Tale of the Ragged Mountains • (1844) • shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• 87 • The Venus Papers • shortstory by Richard Wilson
• 93 • Ye Phantasie Writer and His Catte • poem by Winona McClintic
• 94 • Big, Wide, Wonderful World • [Shock Short] • shortstory by Charles E. Fritch
• 98 • Backwardness • shortstory by Poul Anderson
• 108 • The Best Science Fantasy Books of 1957 (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1958) • essay by Anthony Boucher
• 113 • How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster • (1957) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
• 118 • The Omen • shortstory by Shirley Jackson

Though it's notable that when F&SF readers were polled for their favorite contributions from the history of the magazine, for an all-reprint-fiction 30th Anniversary issue, they chose the non-fantasy, non-sf story by Jackson over the later entries...it would be further reprinted by the fantasy magazine Twilight Zone a half-decade later, and Richard Lupoff would include it in his first volume of stories that probably should've won the Hugo Award...but, then, her heirs almost managed to name the collection of her uncollected stories after "One Ordinary Day..." as well.

For more of today's Jackson and non-Jackson FFB entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.